Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Harald

I
idled away some travel time yesterday reading sections of King
Harald's Saga, available, inter alia, on Kindle from Penguin.
There must be a market for such accounts Viking of derring-do:
Penguin seems to keep quite a number in print. Myself, I have
several weathered paperback editions around the house although I'm
not sure I ever actually read any before: always one of those things
I would get to next year, after finishing Clarissa for example,
or Finnegans Wake (the answers are no, and no).

I
suppose I'm sorry I waited. The Saga
is a rattling good story, with superb intro material by Magnus
Magnusson and Herman Pálsson
(on Magnusson's own remarkable career, go here;
Pálsson's
equally distinctive bio is here).
Harald the protagonist has story enough to fill out any
self-respecting saga: he saw service in Byzantium and Kievan Rus and
died fighting another Harald—rather, Harold—at Stamford Bridge in
the North of England in 1066 (the winner went on to lose the Battle
of Hastings to William of Normandy, aka William the Conqueror). But
in addition to Harald the protagonist, the editors introduce the
reader to another, perhaps even more interesting, character: Snorri
Sturluson, author of the saga and himself an important player in the
tumultuous and violent public life of Scandinavia in his time (Snorri
died in his basement at the hands of an assassin: it is said his last
words were Eigi skal höggva!—"Do
not strike!"). Just off hand, can you think of any other major
historian who was both a writer and
an active politician? The standard model would seen to be Trotsky or
Thucydides, both writing in enforced idleness after their political
careers had ended.

But
I digress; back to Harald. The really extraordinary fact about this
book is the utter absence of anything remotely resembling a “public
purpose” in Harald's career (at least not as seen by Snorri). It's
all hackin' and hewin', life in tooth and claw, triumph and disaster,
betrayal and vengeance.

Which
brings me to one reason why it is so interesting to study the
Scandinavian record: we can observe, at least dimly and inadequately,
the emergence of something you might call “a modern state” (well:
states) out of the turbulent stew of what came before. One is
necessarily tempted to try to find some quick-and-dirty Twitter-style
summary of the transition, and good luck with that. One is tempted,
I suppose, to say “the coming of Christianity,” and I suppose
there is something to the suggestion though not, perhaps, the way it
is commonly understood. It certainly not the case that the Vikings
woke up won day and said “Oh! We're Christians! Let's put down
our swords and love our neighbors as ourselves!” No: the very
process of Christianization was long and painful full of wrong
turnings (though not so painful, perhaps, than the transition that
led to the 30 Years' War on the Continent, nor the Civil War in
England).

But
perhaps you can say this much: perhaps what Christianity did do for
Scandinavia is to bring on board a fully-developed bureaucratic
apparatus with a priestly class, with bishops and archbishops (the
Swedes seem even more serious about this sort of thing than the
Anglicans). But that's not so much “Christianity” per say as a
tradition that extends that right back past the beginning of
Christianity to the Roman empire itself. And they do say all roads
lead there.

3 comments:

marcel
said...

Just off hand, can you think of any other major historian who was both a writer and an active politician? The standard model would seen to be Trotsky or Thucydides, both writing in enforced idleness after their political careers had ended.

But that's the thing--Churchill wrote when he was out of power, partly to leverage his way back into power (but primarily for money). Trotsky would have taken another shot at power in a heartbeat; so, I suspect, would Thucydides. Perhaps the most notable comparison would be Machiavelli--a middleweight bureaucrat who gains a kind of immortality by expounding on a topic he seems never to have been able to handle too well.

Now I'm remembering the (travestied?) Hegel: Napoleon was a great man; I am greater because I thought about Napoleon.

US Grant also fits the bill. Although as far as I can tell, he stumbled into both politics and history after stumbling into generalship. (Quite a stumbler!) His career ambition, I believe, was to teach mathematics.